Tips for Shifting Your Focus at Work

Are you a “busy bee” at work? Do you have trouble with focus at work? If you’re spending all your time checking daily items off of your to-do list but none of those items involve strategic planning or long-range goal-setting, you may be keeping yourself from career advancement. This isn’t just speculation; research by Eudemonia shows that “women’s time in the office may also be siphoned away from the activities that help women advance.”

Ensuring that everyone participates in decision-making (rather than unilaterally making decisions)

While part of leadership certainly involves collaboration and emotional intelligence (EI), what’s notably absent from this list of women’s workplace proclivities is strategy-setting. Women in particular often get caught up in being the go-to office worker bee and catch-all for every project, which can keep them too bogged down in training and daily deliverables to be able to show the boss that they have leadership potential.

Also, by prioritizing participatory decision-making over decisiveness as an individual leader, women often spend too much time trying to gain consensus and play cheerleader for others—to the detriment of their own careers and leadership potential.

If these tendencies sound all too familiar to you, use the following strategies to shift your focus at work to showcase your ability to think strategically:

Balance team development with directive leadership.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with guiding others and helping them grow. But if you spend all of your time on teaching and coaching, you won’t have much energy left to be more directive and analytical. Set limits on the time that you spend on team guidance so that you can expand and grow in other areas.

To that end, work on flexing your preferred style of leadership so that you’re not just seen as the inspirational person on the team, but the one with the great ideas. If you feel that you need additional leadership training to develop more strategic ways of leading, talk to your manager or HR.

If you work for yourself, you can take similar steps by ensuring that you spend at least as much time growing your business as mentoring others who want to “pick your brain.”

Share the costs versus benefits.

The types of collaborative attributes that women are often associated with can take an inordinate amount of time. It takes longer to gain consensus and ensure alignment across groups, for example, than to simply make a decision. That said, collaborative leadership is important as well, particularly in today’s organizations where emotional intelligence is more highly valued and more critical to success than ever.

Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater—instead, be sure that your managers understand that it takes more time to engage in a collaborative style of leadership. If you plan to use this style regularly, be sure that others understand the time costs associated with the benefits of developing others. Then point out your full range of leadership abilities so that you don’t get pigeonholed into one type.

Track how your time is spent.

If what gets measured gets done, then you need to measure your time to know if you’re spending it in ways that can help advance your career. Log your hours spent at work on different types of activities to ensure that you aren’t giving away too much of your day to busy work.

Also avoid over focusing on the types of activities listed above that may help advance others’ careers, but could keep you stagnant if you don’t incorporate more strategic forms of leadership into your repertoire.

What you do every day makes a difference, no matter what your job is. If you want to achieve more and get noticed for your strategic leadership potential, be sure that you don’t spend too much time on activities that won’t help you get ahead in your career or with your business.